Chapter III (3)

'It slipped. Mrs. Max says it, you know; I am weak about taking on colloquialisms.'

'And you are sorry you have been so easily influenced?' Noakes asked in ponderous aggrievement.

'You do not seem to be overjoyed.'

'I am,' he said gently.

'Don't be hilarious over it.'

'I will; I wish--'

'Well, certainly; "Noakes" it shall be.'

'Thanks, Miss Beck.'

'Haven't you done anything but work these days?'

'I have thought more or less.'

'Strange; what about?'

'You, of course.'

'Steady! Spring has passed.'

'And to-night I heard a queer thing about you.'

'What?' she asked in an engaging manner of invitation to confidence.

'That you are to be married. I have it on the word of my landlady.'

'I?'

'So it is rumored in the village.'

'I am glad my family is not so anxious to thrust me off as my friends are.'

'And you are unwilling to be thrust off, as you put it?'

'Married? No, not unwilling; unprepared. It is so very final, you know. A woman gives up everything.'

'Not necessarily.'

'Oh, yes she does: freedom, family, associations.'

'And in return?'

'From the right man she gets--a sort of compensation.'

'Not a high valuation.'

'A true one; she knows she cares more than he does.'

'No, no!' Noakes spoke from a full heart.

'She does; and knowing it, she need not expect equal return--only part compensation. But how good he ought to be!'

'Good?' he asked doubtfully.

'Yes, everything she thinks he is.'

'No man loved of woman is that.'

'Noakes, you are disillusioning, and incorrect, and moreover traitorous to your kind.'

'Not a bit of it; you overpraise my kind.'

'But--let's be definite--you know he may be all--'

'And may not always have been; in which connection he may not be expected to enlighten the dreaming lady, may he?'

'I think he may.'

'But he may possess a certain masculine trait, a kind of secretiveness.'

'Secretive,' she mused. 'Then he is a bit of a coward, I think.'

'He would be a cad,' Noakes said quickly, 'to tell her things that would pain her.'

'Understanding will come sooner or later,' she said oracularly. 'It is better to become accustomed to a thing than have it come as a revelation.'

'I see,' Noakes said; 'like taking a tonic in midwinter to fend off spring fever. You forget,' he continued in a different tone, looking at her speculatively, 'that understanding may never come.'

'Then he has put her on a lower intellectual plane; he has withheld from her, as he might from a child.'

'No, he has loved her too well to hurt her.'

'Loved her so ill that he has deceived her from the beginning.'

'To my mind there is something active in deception; this would be rather an omission.'

'An omission that is an insult to her.'

'Not at all!' Noakes spoke somewhat vehemently.

'Don't think I mean,' she said, 'that there should be a detailed interchange of trivial confidence. That would be tiresome. If, however, there were one big thing in his life that might influence her feeling toward him, he should tell it, and let her judge.'

'Not smooth over a disagreeable occurrence?'

'Never! It would be cruel.'

Noakes sat very still.

'If I were the girl,--' she began, and checked the speech with a faint laugh. 'But we will not be dramatic, nor personal.'

Noakes told himself he had always known that this was her thought; she was too clear-hearted to feel anything else. The understanding of which she had half-seriously spoken must never come, and the only means of avoiding it was to-night's silence, the silence of all the days to follow. He foresaw the revelation which might come, and realized that any abnegation was worthless except the sacrifice of his love. Alive, aware of its possible fulfillment, he could not condemn himself to the sacrifice. She had not asked it of him, and he would not face that which she might ask if he obeyed the weak voice which counseled a surrender to her judgment. To the last intoxicating drop he would drink, in reverent loving-thankfulness for the draught vouchsafed him. He would care, not in fearful accumulation of credit against a day of reckoning, but in surrender to the brimming abundance of their store. He would secure to her freedom from that possible pain by following the inevitable trend.

His regard was a compelling force with which he had lived and grown since he had known Becky. He had not spoken of it to her, silenced by the piteous bane of insufficient income; but now almost he was free. When he spoke, the breadth and depth of the thing it was would induce her assent. Of this he was so sure that he did not consider the possibility of refusal. His failure to anticipate such a chance was by no means due to an under-estimation of her powers of will, determination, or selection; rather to the feeling which, with the beat of his heart, knocked for freedom to go out, out, about the world, and with its sweeping lines converged again, to enter and permeate a heart attuned to reception and response.

He sat beside her on the piano-bench, and placed before her the songs he liked best.

Her voice was a pure soprano, of an expressive sweetness which affected Noakes as nothing else he had known. It seemed to him that her clarity of soul found expression in her exquisitely pure singing tones.

With hands tight-clasped between his knees, fearing to look at her, Noakes listened while she sang him into a half-visualized dream, as obsessing as it was immanent, which he clung to and enjoyed to the full in order that he might ignore the longing then to speak his thought. His dream keyed him to a responsiveness which made his throat throb in sympathy with the vibration of her tones.

Presently he went away.

Alone in the silver-splotched yard, the spell yet held him; but when the white road pointed a way back to what he had left behind, a fog of uncertainty encircled him, dissipating the glow of his dream, checking his anticipation, crushing his problem close to him in the narrow circle of his vision, so close that, although a thing solved and set aside, it loomed ominous and insistent.

He followed the road back to what he had left behind.

In the laboratory Noakes bent over a crucible. The room was still. Not even the night-sounds penetrated the shut door and closed window. The light from a single bulb played upon the set lines of his jaw, and upon the still hand which lay on the switch-lever. He drew a deep breath that quivered through the room with startling distinctness. He bent closer to the tiny quantity of powder in the bottom of the vessel.

Suddenly he stood erect and looked about him. His glance slowly circled the room, and fell to the hand on the switch-lever. Then he advanced the lever.

It came as a burst of light taken up and radiated by clouds of fume and gas with which the air was instantly impregnated. Around Noakes was a white-hot brilliance which he could not face, and could not escape. His eyes pained horribly. He heard a crescendo roaring as of a billow breaking on the shore; as suddenly as it had come, the light went out. He was in darkness. He trained his gaze into the void and succeeded only in augmenting the pain back of his eyes. The darkness was impenetrable. He began to realize what had happened. With a low moan he crumpled and sank to the floor.

Late in the afternoon of the next day, behind a livery horse, two men were covering the roadway between town and the Hallam place. To one the way seemed long. He leaned back wearily and pulled a soft hat down over his bandaged eyes.

'Where are we?' he asked.

'At the gate,' the driver replied.

Noakes stiffened. The gate closed behind them, and the wheels rumbled on the driveway.

'Is--is any one in front?'

'Miss Hallam is on the porch, sir.'

The vehicle came to a stop.

'Afternoon, Miss Beck,' Noakes called.

He tried to make it sound pleasant and commonplace, and knew that he failed.

Grasping the side of the vehicle, he descended clumsily.

Becky took his hand and pressed it warmly. She turned and took a step toward the house, still holding his hand. He withdrew it.

'I--don't, please; I know the way.'

With the shuffling tread of the blind he ascended the walk, stopping uncertainly at the foot of the steps. He heard Becky, at his side, draw a quick breath, as if about to speak. He half-turned to her, and hearing nothing more, mounted the steps heavily.

'Do you know,' he said, as he paused at the top, 'I've never counted these steps before. I didn't know there were so many. Let's sit inside, if you don't mind.'

He went a little way, and Becky put her hand on his arm.

'It's this way, Noakes,' she said gently, as she guided him into the room in which they were the night before.

'Thank you. It's a bit hard to be led,' Noakes said huskily.

They sat on a deep couch.

'Noakes, was it wise to come? I am glad you are here, but won't it hurt you, retard your recovery?' Becky asked anxiously.

'I had to come.'

'Mr. Max told me--both he and the doctor telephoned me early this morning--that in spite of all they said to you, you insisted on coming.'

'I am fit, sound except for my eyes; that's the shame of it,' he said bitterly. 'They couldn't persuade me that I should rest now, rest to recover from a shock that will last a lifetime.'

'I thought--I was afraid you might add fresh danger by coming out so soon.'

'I tell you I had to come!' he said with level forcefulness. 'As for my eyes, the harm is done.'

'Is it irremediable?'

'I am blind.'

'But soon--some day, surely--'

'No. The doctor gives me banalities for answers. I suppose he thinks I would go to pieces if he told me the truth.'

'Yes, perhaps he thinks you could not bear the truth,' Becky assented very gently.

Her low, feeling tones brought a lump to Noakes's throat. He felt the sympathy which quivered in her voice, and it nearly unmanned him; but he misunderstood her meaning. He thought that she felt with him the sting of being deprived of full knowledge of his condition, the hurt of their doubting his strength. That Becky meant something far different, he might have known from her humble acquiescence, and the sudden touch of her hand on his arm.

'I've been trying to think it out,' Noakes said, his voice low at first, roughening and increasing in volume as he spoke, 'but here I am, unweakened in mind and body, and put aside--Not to see, never to see for myself the beautiful things about me; shut out from everything; with power to do, and ability to appreciate, yet put out in darkness; never to--O Becky, you, I can't ever see you again!'

'Don't! You mustn't, please!'

'I didn't intend to speak so to you. I haven't the right. You must pardon me.' He was silent a moment. 'I came to say something else.'

He turned his head about impatiently, calling upon his bandaged eyes to perform their function.

'Is it dark yet?' he asked.

'We are in the gloaming,' Becky answered softly.

Noakes shut his lips, taking counsel of his powers of control before he spoke.

'Becky,' he began, and gave a tired little sigh. 'Let me call you "Becky" to-day.'

'Yes,' she acquiesced quietly.

'Becky,' he continued, lingering over the word, thinking of the privilege of its use as an accolade conferred by her, 'you need not speak when I have finished; I'll go away then.'

'What is it?' Becky asked. 'Tell me.'

Noakes leaned forward, pressing his temples; then sat erect and turned his face toward her.

'I love you,' he said. 'I think it has been through more lifetimes than this; I know I shall always love you. I could no more grow away from it than I could add a cubit to my stature by taking thought. I kept silent because I was poor. Don't think of this as a bit of sordidness creeping in. My love would not ask of you any sacrifice. I could not give you the things you are accustomed to, so I said nothing. I planned and worked for a time when I would be privileged to speak.'

He heard an inarticulate sound at his side, and quickly continued:--

'Last night I thought the time was close at hand. I thought in a few days I could come to you, and ask you for your love. Success of a certain kind was about to crown an effort of a despicable kind. Of that I must tell you. To-night I am confessing a wrong I have done you. That's what it is. O, Becky, the explosion last night took away my sight, made me a useless blind man, but it opened my eyes too! It is as if a scroll were outspread before me, on which is a record of all my tendencies and crucial acts. I can see my failures at the crises of my life, and I can trace them back to causes, can see wherein a lightly taken determination has later borne bitter fruit. Last night I thought I had reached the pinnacle of attainment; in reality I had fallen lower than ever before. The success which was to be the beginning of all good things was stolen. I robbed Maxineff of it. He gave me an idea to work out. I followed his instructions to a point where I knew a different treatment might bring about a fine result. I saw great possibilities in the experiment and determined to keep for myself the benefits of it. From that point I followed my own ideas, and called the thing mine. I opened correspondence with the representatives of a foreign government. They agreed to buy the secret in case of a successful test. It was an excellent bargain I made--I put a high price on the betrayal of my benefactor! The experiment was successful. I was forced to destroy the result, why it is needless to say. Last night, when I left you, I went back to repeat the experiment, intending to make a small quantity to be used in the test which would have taken place to-morrow. Something went wrong with the unstable stuff,--and you know the rest.'

In relief from the tension of his confession, his voice dropped lower as he said, 'Now you know me!'

He shifted his position, stretching out his hands toward her. He touched her face, started, and drew back.

'And Becky, do you realize that it was after I left you last night that I went back? After what you told me? O Becky, I am glad I cannot see you now!'

His voice quivered off to a whisper.

'It is poor consolation that I know myself for what you judge me. I know bitterly well; I see much now. I could not come to the weakest agreement with the self I want to be, until I had told you of the wrong I have done you. And let me think my love is not distasteful to you. I know I am past your caring for, and I'll never ask it of you, but let me keep on loving you. Won't you, Becky?'

He paused and listened. He heard Becky's uneven breathing.

'I don't offer any excuse; there is none to offer. I want only the comparative peace of the assurance that those I have wronged understand now. I have talked with Mr. Maxineff. He was with me afterwards, when the pain--He hushed me far too gently, but he will not forget. You will not forget either, Becky, and you will not excuse. If, though, you should ask me why, I would say again, I love you. It is the only reason. I was thinking of you while I was making myself unfit for you to think of me.'

'Do you care so much?' Becky asked softly.

'Yes. May I keep on caring?'

'To what good?'

'For the sake of the little good in me, which love of you will keep alive and growing.'

'You ask nothing of me. What will you find in caring for me?'

'There will be a constant joy in knowing that you permit me to care.'

Becky was silent.

'If you won't let me, I am afraid it will make no difference, because I cannot help it, you know. I don't want to help it; you don't mind my saying so?'

For a moment neither of them spoke. Noakes rose.

'I--Becky, I thank you for hearing me out.'

He went a step away from her.

'I'm going.'

She did not rise.

'I am glad you have not spoken of my--my mistake; and somehow I am sorry. I know what you--'

'How do you know what I think?'

'I know; that's all.'

'Don't go, please,' Becky said.

'Hadn't I better? I'm tired, and the doctor--A last acknowledgment: I am afraid to hear you.'

'But I don't want you to go,' she said softly.

Something in her tone made Noakes turn sharply.

'Becky!'

'Yes, Noakes?'

'You don't--'

'Yes!'

'You love me, and blind?'

'You are brave!'

Her hands were in his when he sat by her side.

'I talked with the doctor this morning,' she said.

'As I did.'

'No. He gave me a message for you.'

'A message from the doctor?'

'It was Mr. Max's notion that I should tell you.'

'What is it?' Noakes asked quickly.

'Your eyes--they will be well in time, if you are very careful.'

As Noakes breathed deep in relief and gratitude, one of his hands engaged two of Becky's, and he found a different use for the other.

'Noakes,' Becky said, 'I'll take care of the eyes.'

THE GARDEN OF MEMORIES

BY C. A. MERCER

The garden looked dreary and desolate in spite of the afternoon sunshine. The lilac and lavender bushes were past their prime; their wealth of sweetness had been squandered by riotous offshoots. The wind played among the branches, and cast changing sun-flecked shadows on the grass-grown paths, narrowed by the encroachment of the box borders that had once lined the way with the stiff precision of troops before a royal progress.

The flowers had the air of being overburdened with the monotony of their existence. They could never have had that aspect if they had been only wild flowers and had never experienced human care and companionship. That made the difference.

The gate hung on rusty hinges; it answered with a long-drawn-out creaking, as it was pushed open by a man who had been a stranger to the place for nearly twenty years.

Yes, the garden was certainly smaller than it had been pictured by his memory. There had been a time when it had appeared as a domain of extensive proportions, and the wood beyond of marvelous depth and density.

He was conscious of a sense of disappointment. The property would scarcely realize as high a price in the market as he had hoped; and it was incumbent upon him to part with it, if he would be released from the narrow circumstances that hemmed him in.

He had arranged to meet the lawyer there that afternoon. One of the latter's clients had already made a bid for the estate. The timber, at all events, would add to the value.

The house faced southward upon the garden. It was here the man had been brought up by an old great-aunt. He guessed later that she had grudged him any of the endearments that death had denied her bestowing upon her own children. Her affections had all been buried before he was born. Besides, he took after the wrong branch of the family.

She must have possessed a strong personality. It was difficult to bring to mind that it was no longer an existent force. Every one, from the parson to the servants, had stood a little in awe of her. He remembered the unmoved manner in which she had received the news of the death of a near relative. It had overwhelmed him with a sudden chill, that so she would have received tidings of his own. It had taken all the sunshine in the garden to make him warm again.

In the mood that was growing upon him, it would not have much surprised him to find her sitting bolt upright in her carved high-back chair, as she had sat in the time of his earliest recollections,--the thin, yellow hands, on which the rings stood out, folded in her lap. On one occasion she had washed his small hands between hers. The hard lustre of the stones acquired a painful association with the ordeal. The blinds would be partially drawn in the musk-scented parlor, to save the carpet from further fading, for there had been a tradition of thrift in the family from the time of its settlement,--a tradition that had not been maintained by its latest representative.

Like the atmosphere of a dream, the years grew dim and misty between now and the time when summer days were longer and sunnier, and it had been counted to him for righteousness if he had amused himself quietly and not given trouble.

A stream that he had once dignified with the name of river formed a boundary between the garden and the wood. Although it had shrunk into shallow insignificance,--with much beside,--a faint halo of the romance with which he had endued this early scene of his adventures still clung to the spot.

As he came to the stream, he saw the reflection of a face in the water--not his own, but that of one much younger.

It was so he met the boy. The child had been placing stepping-stones to bridge the stream, and now came across, balancing himself on the slippery surfaces to test his work. It was odd that he had remained unobserved until this moment, but that was due to the fact of the water-rushes on the brink being as tall as he.

The boy's eyes met those of the man with a frank, unclouded gaze. He did not appear astonished. That is the way when one is young enough to be continually viewing fresh wonders; one takes everything for granted. He saw at a glance that this other was not alien to him; his instinct remained almost as true as those of the wild nature around.

For his own part, he had an unmistakable air of possession about him. He appeared to belong to the place as much as the hollyhocks and honeysuckle; and yet, how could that be?

'Probably a child of the caretaker,' the man told himself.

He had authorized the agent to do what was best about keeping the house in order. He had not noticed what signs it had to show of habitation. Now he saw from the distance that it had not the unoccupied appearance he had expected of it; nor the windows, the dark vacant stare of those that no life behind illumines.

'Do you live here?' he asked of the boy.

'Yes.' The boy turned proudly toward the modest gray pile in the manner of introducing it, forgetting himself in his subject. 'It's a very old house. There's a picture over the bureau in the parlor of the man who built it, and planted the trees in the wood. Hannah says--

'Hannah!'

It was a foolish repetition of the name. Of course there were other Hannahs in the world. The old servant of that name, who had told the man stories in his boyhood, had been dead more years than the child could number.

'Yes,--don't you know Hannah? She'll come and call me in presently, and then you'll see her. Hannah says they--the trees--have grown up with the family' (he assumed a queer importance, evidently in unconscious mimicry of the one who had repeated the tradition to him), 'and that with them the house will stand or fall. Do you think the roots really reach so far?'

There was an underlying uneasiness in the tone, which it was impossible altogether to disguise.

As the other expressed his inability to volunteer an opinion on this point, the boy went on, seeing that his confidences were treated with due respect:

'I dug up one myself once--I wished I hadn't afterwards--to make myself a Christmas tree like I'd read about. I just had to hang some old things I had on it. It was only a tiny fir, small enough to go in a flower-pot; but that night the house shook, and the windows rattled as if all the trees in the forest were trying to get in. I heard them tapping their boughs ever so angrily against the pane. As soon as it was light, I went out and planted the Christmas tree again. I hadn't meant to keep it out of the ground long: they might have known that.'

'Have you no playfellows here?'

The boy gave a comprehensive glance around. 'There are the trees; they are good fellows. I wouldn't part with one of them. It's fine to hear them all clap their hands when we are all jolly together. There are nests in them, too, and squirrels. We see a lot of one another.'

This statement was not difficult to believe: the Holland overalls bore evident traces of fellowship with mossy trunks.

The boy did most of the talking. He had more to tell of the founder of the family whose portrait hung in the parlor, and of how, when he--the child--grew up, he rather thought of writing books, as that same ancestor had done, and making the name great and famous again. He had not decided what kind of books he should write yet. Was it very hard to find words to rhyme, if one tried poetry? He was at no pains to hide such fancies and ambitions, of which his kind are generally too sensitive or too ashamed to speak to their elders, and which are as a rule forgotten as soon as outgrown.

'Shall we go in the wood now?' said the boy. 'It's easy enough to cross over the stepping-stones.'

'Yes, let us go.' The man was beginning to see everything through the boy's eyes. The garden was again much as he had remembered it, inclosed in a world of beautiful mystery. Nothing was really altered. What alteration he had imagined had been merely a transitory one in himself. The child had put a warm, eager hand into his; together they went into the wood, as happy as a pair of truant school boys; they might have been friends of long standing.

'So this is your enchanted forest?' said the man.

'Not really enchanted,' replied the boy seriously. 'I once read of one, but of course it was only in a fairy tale. That one vanished as soon as one spoke the right word. It would be a very wrong word that could make this vanish.' He had a way of speaking of the wood as if it were some sacred grove.

His companion suddenly felt guilty, not quite knowing why.

'Of course some one might cut them down.' The boy lowered his voice; it seemed shameful to mention the perpetration of such a deed aloud. 'It would be terrible to hear them groan when the axe struck them. The young ones mightn't mind so much; but it would be bad for the grandfather trees who've been here from the beginning. Hannah says one would still hear them wailing on stormy nights.'

'Even if they had been felled and carted away?'

'Yes, even then; though, to be sure, there would be no one to hear the wailing if it's true that the house must fall, too, at the same time. But we needn't trouble about that; none of it is likely to happen. You see, if it did, where should I be?'

He laughed merrily. This last argument appeared to him to be quite conclusive. Such an important consideration placed the awful contingency quite out of the question, and transformed it into nothing more than a joke.

The child's laughter died away as they both stood still to listen. Each thought he had heard his own name called.

'It's Hannah,' said the boy; and off he raced toward the house, barely saving himself from running into the arms of another person who had turned in at the gate.

* * * * *

'Who was the boy who ran round by the espaliers a minute ago? One would scarcely have judged him to be a child of the caretaker.'

The man's heart sank with a dull thud: something had told him the answer before it came.

'Child!' The lawyer looked puzzled. 'I did not see one. No children have any business in this garden; neither is there any caretaker here. The house has been shut up altogether since the old servant you called Hannah died, eleven years ago.'

They had reached the veranda. The westering sun had faded off the windows. It was easy to see that the house was empty. The shutters were up within, and the panes dark and weather-stained. Birds had built their nests undisturbed about the chimney stacks. The hearthstones had long been cold.

'My client is willing to purchase the property on the terms originally proposed,' the lawyer was saying. 'He contemplates investing in it as a building site. Of course the timber would have to be felled--'

A breeze passed through the treetops like a shudder. The younger man interposed:--

'I am sorry you should have had the trouble of coming here, but I have decided to keep the old place after all--stick and stone. It is not right it should go out of the family. I must pull my affairs together as well as I can without that.'

The little phantom of his dead boyhood was to suffer no eviction.

THE CLEAREST VOICE

BY MARGARET SHERWOOD

The little business frown which John Wareham usually wore only at his office, and put off as he put on his hat in starting for home, lingered that evening, persisting through the long street-car ride, the walk past rows of suburban houses, and even to the brook at the foot of the hill below his home. Here it vanished, for the brook marked the spot where the world stopped, and Alice began. He watched with a meditative happy smile the rough stone fence which bordered this bit of meadow land, with the trailing woodbine and clematis that made it a thing of beauty; and, as he climbed the hill, the deepening color in the sunset clouds, and the notes of a wood thrush from the forest edge not far away, became part of a deep sense of harmony, breaking a mood of anxiety and fear.

Then came the comforting glimpse of the red brick house through the encompassing green, with its white daintiness of porch, fan-window, and window-facings. It all looked like her; in its serene and simple distinction it seemed to embody her; her creative touch was everywhere. The bay window, about which they had disagreed when the house was planned, had, surprisingly, turned out to the liking of both. As he fumbled at the latch of the gate, and pinched his finger as he always did, a vexed sense of triumph came to him, for it surely would have worked better if he had insisted on having his own way! Everywhere were traces of little worries and little triumphs, the latter predominating. It was the very soul of home, from the threshold to the branches of the tall elm which touched the roof protectingly; it was wholly desirable,--and it might have to go.

As he followed the brick walk, in bitterness he closed his eyes that he might not see, and so ran into a porch pillar, the one on which Alice's red roses were blossoming; the queer little groan that he gave in some strange way took on the sound of 'Railroads!' and again 'Railroads!' as he beat his head against the pillar once or twice purposely; and his voice had a note of contempt. He had not felt that way about railroads when he had invested his savings, partly in the stock of a new railroad in the West, partly in the stock of an old railroad in the East that was doing wild things in the way of improvements. Then there had been nothing too good for him to say about the earning power of railroads, the wise management of railroads, the net profits of railroads. Now, both railroads were in trouble; dividends were cut, and the stock which he had hoped to sell at a profit had dropped almost to zero; the mortgage loan on his house was due in a month; and he, a man earning only a moderate salary in a real-estate office, had nothing in the world wherewith to meet the emergency. Even the savings-bank deposit had gone into railroad stock, in order that the mortgage might be paid off more quickly.

But his face lighted up with a smile both sad and bright which made quite a different face of it as he crossed the threshold, that threshold on which Alice had stopped to kiss him the day he had married her and brought her home. There was something here that shut out all the trouble in the universe: about the doorway his wife's laughter seemed to be always floating,--that laughter, merry, touched with tenderness, made up of mirth and sorrow, as all wise laughter is. Just then came little Jack to meet him, speeding madly down the baluster; and John, as he picked up his boy, kissed him, and reproved him for coming downstairs that way, had nothing to answer, when his son averred that it was lots better than a railroad, save 'That might well be.'

'There's ice-cream for dinner,' the boy exploded; and the father, roughly smoothing Jack's tousled hair, started as he caught a sound of chatter from the living-room, and stood still in dismay. That to-day of all days should be the time of the family gathering which brought two uncles, two aunts, and three cousins to the house! How completely he had forgotten! He hung up his hat and grasped little Jack's hand; he would tell them nothing about his troubles, nothing; he would be the ideal host, concealing his personal vexations under a cordial smile.

But hardly had he opened the door, with his office bag still held absent-mindedly in his hand, when they were upon him. The cordial smile did not deceive them for a minute. Aunt Janet, who was sitting by the fireplace, looked the most troubled of all, though she said nothing. It was 'Why, John, what's the matter?' from Aunt Mary, and 'Well, John, how goes it?' from Uncle Philip, who looked as if he knew that it went very badly indeed; and 'What makes you look so worried? With a home like this, no man ought to look worried,' from his Cousin Austin, who had recently become engaged and was thinking about homes. He nodded approvingly at the room, which was simply furnished, soft in coloring, with English chintzes, a few pictures of trees and of water,--all out-of-door things,--and a fireplace that showed signs of constant use.

John's face brightened as he caught this look of admiration; not all the confusion of greeting and inquiries in regard to health, not all the business worries in the world could check the sense of peace that always came to him in entering this room, which, more perfectly than any other spot, expressed the personality of Alice. He managed to make his way through the little crowd of sympathetic wrinkled faces, and wondering smooth faces. There were, it was discovered, comfortable chairs enough for all, and John found himself, as host, the centre of a little group bent on probing his affairs, in friendly fashion, to the bottom.

It was his sister Emily who finally started the flood of questioning that led to the betrayal of the secret he had meant to keep for the present. She came bustling in through the door leading to the dining-room, looking anxious as soon as she glanced at her brother; and from the brass bowl of yellow roses held unsteadily in her hand, a few drops spattered to the floor.

'Are you ill, John,' she asked, 'or have you lost--'

Among all the many voices of inquiry, comment, question whereby she was interrupted, the voice of Alice was the clearest, making the others, no matter how near the speakers stood, seem to come from far away. Little Jack came and climbed upon his father's knee, a curious reproduction of the family look of worry appearing on his chubby face. John the elder leaned his head back in the chintz-covered chair, shutting his eyes for a minute with a sense of warmth and satisfaction, and the nearness of the cuddling body of his son.

'Everything's the matter,' he said wearily, 'everything'; and he had a momentary twinge of conscience, realizing that he was not being the ideal host.

They all watched him anxiously, sympathetically, in silence; and Aunt Mary, near the window, went on drawing her needle in and out with exquisite precision, her gray head bent over a centrepiece which she intended to present to the house.

'Oh no, I'm not ill,' said John Wareham, suddenly sitting upright; 'but the Long Gorge Railroad has gone into a receiver's hands, and three days ago the New York and Nineveh cut its dividend. I'm done for.'

Emily gave a little gasp, and said nothing. 'You will pull through all right,' asserted Uncle Philip, stirring up the fire in order to hide his face. And Cousin Austin slapped John's shoulder, saying facetiously, 'Take courage, Jeremiah. The worst is yet to come.'

John laughed in spite of himself, and struck his fist upon the knee not occupied by Jack.

'Every dollar I had in the world I had drawn out and put into those two cursed things. Now I've nothing, no capital, no credit. The place has got to go.'

'No, no!' cried the women-folk.

'The place has got to go,' repeated John Wareham, his face in little Jack's hair. 'And I feel as if I could rob a bank or a jewelry store to prevent that.'

Jack burst into a delighted giggle, through which John heard, 'You wouldn't do any such thing, and you mustn't talk that way before Jack.' It was Alice who spoke, with a little catch in her voice that sometimes came, half way between a laugh and a sob; and it was echoed by the two aunts.

'Railroads!' growled John, with supreme contempt. 'It would have been a great deal better if railroads had never been invented. Jack, we shall have to get a prairie schooner, and trek to the West.'

Jack's eyes shone like stars, but he got no chance to say anything, for, with that outburst, the springs of speech were loosened. There was the clamor, the chorus clamor, of relatives, indignant, inquisitive, sympathetic relatives, all eager to help, and all uneasily conscious that their own small measure of prosperity would hardly stand the strain. He shook his head sadly in answer to the inquiry as to whether he could not borrow: he had no security. Aunt Mary did not fail to remind him that she had warned him at the time; Aunt Janet, in a thin but affectionate voice, admitted that she had suffered in the same way heavily. And then the clock ticked through a brief silence.

'Why don't you read your letters?' asked Emily suddenly. She stood, absent-mindedly arranging the flowers with one finger, busy already with plans for the future.

There was a small pile of letters on the centre table, quite within John's reach; he began tearing open the envelopes in mechanical fashion, throwing them untidily upon the floor. As each one fell, Jack slid down and picked it up, climbing back to his father's knee. One was a wedding announcement; one was a plumber's bill; at the third, John paused, read, looked up bewildered, and read again.

'Why, Emily!' he exploded, boyishly. 'This can't be. Read that, will you, and tell me if I have lost my mind.'

Emily put down the roses, and read the letter slowly, wonderingly, smiling even as her brother had smiled.

'Not Uncle John! And we were always so afraid of him!'

'Twenty thousand dollars!' murmured John.

Open-mouthed silence waited upon them, until Cousin Austin broke the spell with,--

'I say, would you mind if I looked over your shoulder?'

And John flung him the letter with a little whoop of joy.

'Is this plain living, or is this a fairy story?' he demanded quizzically. 'I never thought of myself as a dark-eyed hero with a fortune dropping into my hands just in the nick of time! A title ought to go with it.'

The vibrant energy of the man was back again; the dry humor which, in sunny seasons, quivered about his mouth, was once more there; the mocking incredulity of his words belied the growing look of peace and security in his face. The years seemed slipping from him, bringing him a mellow boyhood.

'Twenty thousand dollars isn't exactly a fortune, John.'

'It will buy the place twice over,' exulted the man, 'and we shan't have to start for the West in a prairie schooner right away!'

'Shan't we, papa?' asked little Jack, in hungry disappointment.

But the child's shrill voice had little chance where everybody was speaking at once. Aunt Mary's 'Well, I hope you hang on to this, and not be foolish again,' and Cousin Austin's 'You deserve it, John,' and Uncle Howard's 'Well, I _am_ glad. Shake!' and several other congratulatory remarks all came at once.

'The poor old fellow; the poor old fellow,' said John to himself softly, rubbing his hands. 'I suppose he died out in Oklahoma all alone. How he happened to will this to me, I give up; he didn't like me very well.'

The very atmosphere of the room had changed; once more a feeling of quiet pleasure pervaded it. The full sense of home, peace, security came back, with a suggestion of a kettle singing on the hearth, though there was no kettle nearer than the kitchen.

'But there's Frank--' It must have been Alice who suggested this, and a something disturbing, questioning, crept into the air.

'Frank!' said John Wareham suddenly. 'Why, I'd forgotten all about Frank! We haven't heard of him for more than fifteen years or so, have we?'

'More than that,' answered Emily. 'He was in Mexico, the last we knew.'

'He may be living,' suggested John. 'Mexico is always in such a state--I suppose the mails can't be trusted.'

'We ought to find out,' said Alice.

'Uncle John had cast him off,' suggested Emily tentatively, anxiously.

'But he was Uncle John's own son,' said Alice, earnestly, compellingly; 'and wasn't Uncle John in the wrong?'

'Uncle John was a queer customer,' said John hastily. 'He was cranky, no doubt about it, but he wasn't crazy; and if this lawyer's statement is correct, I've got a good legal right to the twenty thousand, haven't I?'

'Of course you have!' said Aunt Mary.

'But the moral right?' whispered Alice.

'What was the quarrel about, anyway?' asked Austin. 'Frank's marriage, wasn't it? I never heard much about it.'

'That was part of it,' said Aunt Janet. 'Frank, you know, fell in love with a little country girl whom his father did not want him to marry, but he insisted on having his way, and married her.'

'Good for him,' nodded Austin approvingly.

Little Jack, glancing from one to another with wide blue eyes, was silently weaving his philosophy of life, and his interpretation of humanity.

'Religion was mixed up in it in some way,' contributed John. 'Uncle grew to be something of a fanatic, and he wanted them both to believe what he believed, and they wouldn't, or didn't, or couldn't. It was incompatibility of temper all round, I dare say.'

'Frank was a good son,' reminded Alice. 'He was patient with his father, and he all but gave up his life for Uncle John, nursing him through diphtheria.'

More and more the sweet, persistent voice brought trouble and question into the atmosphere from which trouble and question had so suddenly cleared. The new security began to seem unstable; the new-found joy a stolen thing. Even in the pauses, the personality of the woman spoke from curtain and cushion and fireplace of this room of her devising. She dominated the whole, seeming the only presence there; brother and sister and guests shrank in the radiance of her.

'Do you really think I ought to hunt Frank up?' asked the man.

Emily shook her head, but doubtfully.

'You probably couldn't find him, after all these years.'

'I could try,' admitted John.

'Nonsense!' cried Aunt Mary, over her embroidery. 'You stay right where you are, and pay off your mortgage. A man who has worked as hard as you have, and has had as much trouble, ought to take a bit of good luck when it comes.'

'Think how much good you could do with it,' murmured Aunt Janet.

'As the pickpocket said when he put the stolen dime in the collection plate,' said Austin; but fortunately Aunt Janet did not understand.

'Uncle had a right to do what he pleased with his own,' said John defiantly. 'If he chose to cast off his son, for reasons which he considered sufficient, he had the right.'

'But you cannot cast off your son,' persisted Alice. 'John, we have a boy of our own. You know that the obligation is one of all eternity; you cannot get rid of fatherhood.'

'O papa, papa, you hurt me,' squealed little John, suddenly interrupted in his philosophy-weaving.

'Confound it all!' cried John with sudden irritation. 'Isn't this just like life! To hold out the rope, just to grab it away again with a grin--I won't, I say. What is mine is mine.'

'But it isn't yours.'

'Did Frank have any children?' he asked.

'Several, I believe,' admitted Emily reluctantly.

'And he never got on?'

'He never got on.'

'And the twenty thousand might save their pesky little Mexican souls.'

The child's laughter rippled out across the shocked silence of the elders.

'Maybe Uncle John left them something,' suggested Emily. 'For a man who tried such big things this doesn't seem much money.'

Her brother shook his head.

'"The entire sum of which he stands possessed,"' he read from the lawyer's letter.

'You might make a few inquiries through the post. I rather imagine the Mexican mail service isn't very trustworthy,' suggested Aunt Mary, hopefully.

He looked at her, but in abstracted fashion, as if it were not to Aunt Mary that he was listening.

'I'll write to this Oklahoma lawyer, and then I must go to Mexico.'

'Isn't it a little quixotic?'

'It's most likely all kinds of foolishness, like everything else I do,' groaned the man. 'But it's what I'd want done for my little chap if I were dead and he alive, and I had quarreled with him. I suppose I could keep this money and save my skin, but--'

'You couldn't keep it without finding out,' murmured Alice, 'because you are you, and the real you is incapable of doing a mean thing.'

'You must do as you think best,' said Emily at last. 'Maybe, if you find Frank, he won't want it all, but will divide, knowing that his father willed it to you.'

'That may be as it may be,' said the man, leaning back in his chair with the face of one listening. 'But I go to Mexico. It's a queer game we play here, and I'll be dashed if I can understand it, but I'm going to play it as fairly as I know how.'

* * * * *

So the voice of Alice won, of Alice, who had been dead for five long years.

THE MARBLE CHILD

BY E. NESBIT

All over the pavement of the church spread the exaggerated cross-hatching of the old pews' oak, a Smithfield market of intersecting lines such as children made with cards in the old days when kings and knaves had fat legs bulging above their serviceable feet, and queens had skirts to their gowns and were not cut across their royal middles by mirrors reflecting only the bedizened torso of them and the charge--heart, trefoil, or the like--in the right-hand top corner of the oblong that framed them.

The pew had qualities: tall fat hassocks, red cushions, a comparative seclusion, and, in the case of the affluent, red curtains drawn at sermon-time.

The child wearied by the spectacle of a plump divine, in black gown and Geneva bands, thumping the pulpit-cushions in the madness of incomprehensible oratory, surrendered his ears to the noise of intonations which, in his own treble, would have earned the reprimand, 'Naughty temper.' His eyes, however, were, through some oversight of the gods of his universe, still his own. They found their own pasture: not, to be sure, the argent and sable of gown and bands, still less the gules of flushed denunciatory gills.

There is fair pasture in an old church which, when Norman work was broken down, men loved and built again as from the heart, with pillars and arches, which, to their rude time, symbolized all that the heart desires to materialize, in symbolic stone. The fretted tombs where the effigies of warrior and priest lay life-like in dead marble, the fretted canopies that brooded above their rest. Tall pillars like the trunks of the pine woods that smelt so sweet, the marvel of the timbered roof--turned upside down it would be like a ship. And what could be easier than to turn it upside down? Imagination shrank bashfully from the pulpit already tightly tenanted, but the triforium was plainly and beautifully empty; there one could walk, squeezing happily through the deep thin arches and treading carefully by the unguarded narrow ledge. Only if one played too long in the roof aunts nudged, and urgent whispers insisted that one must not look about like that in church. When this moment came it came always as a crisis foreseen, half dreaded, half longed-for. After that the child kept his eyes lowered, and looked only at the faded red hassocks from which the straw bulged, and in brief, guarded, intimate moments, at the other child.

The other child was kneeling, always, whether the congregation knelt or stood or sat. Its hands were clasped. Its face was raised, but its back bowed under a weight--the weight of the font, for the other child was of marble and knelt always in the church, Sundays and week-days. There had been once three marble figures holding up the shallow basin, but two had crumbled or been broken away, and now it seemed that the whole weight of the superimposed marble rested on those slender shoulders.

The child who was not marble was sorry for the other. He must be very tired.

The child who was not marble,--his name was Ernest,--that child of weary eyes and bored brain, pitied the marble boy while he envied him.

'I suppose he doesn't really feel, if he's stone,' he said. 'That's what they mean by the stony-hearted tyrant. But if he does feel-- How jolly it would be if he could come out and sit in my pew, or if I could creep under the font beside him. If he would move a little there would be just room for me.'

The first time that Ernest ever saw the marble child move was on the hottest Sunday in the year. The walk across the fields had been a breathless penance, the ground burned the soles of Ernest's feet as red-hot ploughshares the feet of the saints. The corn was cut, and stood in stiff yellow stooks, and the shadows were very black. The sky was light, except in the west beyond the pine trees, where blue-black clouds were piled.

'Like witches' feather-beds,' said Aunt Harriet, shaking out the folds of her lace shawl.

'Not before the child, dear,' whispered Aunt Emmeline.

Ernest heard her, of course. It was always like that: as soon as any one spoke about anything interesting, Aunt Emmeline intervened. Ernest walked along very melancholy in his starched frill. The dust had whitened his strapped shoes, and there was a wrinkle in one of his white socks.

'Pull it up, child, pull it up,' said Aunt Jessie; and shielded from the world by the vast silk-veiled crinolines of three full-sized aunts, he pulled it up.

On the way to church, and indeed, in all walks abroad, you held the hand of an aunt; the circumferent crinolines made the holding an arm's-length business, very tiring. Ernest was always glad when, in the porch, the hand was dropped. It was just as the porch was reached that the first lonely roll of thunder broke over the hills.

'I knew it,' said Aunt Jessie, in triumph; 'but you would wear your blue silk.'